In all areas of society there is an increasing desire to be environmentally friendly. One important aspect of this is to make existing applications more energy efficient. Preferably power consumption should be reduced without reducing the performance of the application as perceived by the user.
Today Central Processing Units (CPU) can be made more and more energy efficient even with a high processing power. There is a desire to achieve more energy-efficient operator networks. The term operator network in this document is intended to cover backbone networks such as operator networks or enterprise networks, that is, a part of a network infrastructure interconnecting other pieces of network, providing connections between, for example, access networks and/or local networks such as Local Area Networks (LAN), business networks, etc.
The question of energy efficiency in operator networks is addressed in the prior art, for example by the introduction of blade servers. A blade server is a self-contained computer server having all the computer functions of a server but with some support functions centralized to a blade enclosure arranged to provide for several blade servers. Typically, the blade enclosure provides services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. This reduces the physical space required by the servers and also the power requirements.
Virtualization also enables energy efficiency to some extent. The concept of virtualization covers different types of abstraction of computer or network resources, to enable a more efficient use, for example, by dividing physical networks into a number of logical networks. Such technologies include virtual networks such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN). The Ethernet headers will include information regarding these different types of connections.
For example, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections may be used, in which case the Ethernet headers will include information regarding VPN services. In a virtual private network (VPN) links between nodes may be carried by open connections or virtual circuits in a larger network, such as the Internet, as opposed to running across a single private network. The Link Layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the transport network. One common application is to secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN does not need to have explicit security features such as authentication or content encryption.
VLAN technologies enable the creation of independent logical networks within a physical network. Technologies for VLAN include, but are not limited to, PB, Provider Backbrone Bridges (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridge—Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE) and Multi-protocol Label Switching—Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE).